Pages

Friday, 16 November 2012

Wild Edric - and the art of writing

by Pauline Fisk

My whole life
has been spent trying to bring together ‘real life’ and the world of
fantasy, in particular by finding new and interesting ways of expressing
a sense of the magical in my writing. Ever since I was five years old,
hunting down fairies in the back alley behind my parents’ house, a sense
of more to life than meets the eye has been part of who I am. When I
was a child, life was one big fairy tale. That was how I felt. But how
to get into that fairy tale? How to make that fairy tale my life, and
make it real and be a part of it?

It was through
stories that I found the way. I couldn’t write when I was five years
old, but I could make up stories and that was what I did, standing at
the garden fence, telling them out loud to the big children in the house
next door, lined up on their side of the fence asking, ‘What happened
next?’ But those stories, made up off the top of my head, were
ephemeral. They were fly-by-nights, whereas words on paper had a
strange new durability which I discovered when I learnt to write.
Describing Winnie the Pooh hunting honey made me part of the story.
Adventuring with the Famous Five turned them into a Famous Six. I made
those things my own, and I made them real - and simply by writing about
them.

This is
something I’ve been doing ever since. When, at the end of ‘Mad Dog
Moonlight’, I wrote about a river flowing through the stars, I put
myself onto that river and sailed away. When Abren in ‘Sabrina Fludde’
turned to water and flowed down a mountain, I flowed too. And when
hoof-prints beat upon the hill behind my house, I knew that Wild Edric,
himself - that glorious superhero of Shropshire legend - was passing in
the night. By writing him into ‘Midnight Blue’, I wasn’t just making
him up. The act of writing brought him to life.

Tolkien defines
fairy tales as stories about the adventures of humankind in Faerie, and
here amongst the hills, valleys, woods and towns of my home county,
Shropshire, Faerie’s all around me. It’s where I live. It’s a fabled
place. And I’m twice blessed, because it also exists inside my
head.

The power of imagination is the land called Faerie. ‘We
may put a deadly green upon a man’s face and produce horror. We may
make the rare and terrible blue moon to shine, or we may cause woods to
spring with silver leaves and rams to wear fleeces of gold. In such
‘fantasy’ as it is called, new form is made; Faerie begins, Man becomes a
sub-creator.’

Tolkien again,
who wrote fairy tales for adults to read as a natural branch of
literature rather than playing at ‘being children’, or pretending to
enjoy them for the sake of the kids. ‘When we can take green from grass, blue from leaves and red from blood, we have already an enchanter’s power,’ he wrote. And what else compares to having that power?

As a child I was
captivated by Hans Christian Anderson’s Fairy Tales. As a teenager I
discovered Alan Garner’s ‘Weirdstone of Brisingamen’. Starting out in
life as a writer myself, I fell head-first into Tolkien, and took some
extracting. Finally I found my own voice and my own way into Faerie.
This was a long process, which is what the word ‘finally’ is all about.
For many years I thought that if I sounded like the writers I admired,
Emily Bronte, Dylan Thomas, JRR Tolkien, Graham Greene – whoever the
favourite of the moment might be – then I’d be a ‘proper’ writer but, if
I sounded like myself, nobody would ever read me. A book of terrible
short stories was published at the age of twenty-three [long since out
of print, thank God], its lofty style definitely not mine. It wasn’t
until years later, embarking upon ‘Midnight Blue’ that I developed the
confidence as a writer to be myself.

I’m indebted to
that decision. ‘Midnight Blue’ would never have been written without
it. But it also would never have been written without Charlotte Burne,
the first woman president of the Folklore Society, whose ‘Shropshire
Folk-Lore: A Sheaf of Gleanings’ introduced me to Wild Edric, whose
mysterious presence haunts ‘Midnight Blue’.

According to
legend, whenever England is in danger, Wild Edric and his knights rise
up from their sleep of centuries beneath a rugged range of Shropshire
hills called the Stiperstones, and ride out in warning of impending
doom. Charlotte Burne recorded conversations with people who claimed
he’d been heard and seen before both the Battle of Waterloo and the
First World War.

The history
behind the story, as recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, tells of a
local lord who, having refused to submit to the Norman Conquest by
raising a rebellion which was decisively defeated, betrayed his people
by joining forces with the Conqueror. For this dastardly about-face,
‘Wild Edric’, as he became known, was doomed to sleep beneath the
Stiperstones with his knights, only ever finding the release of death
when England returned to her rightful people. He sleeps still, and some
legends have added the comfort of a fairy wife, the Lady Godda, though
others have him meeting and losing her before his days of betrayal and
doom.

Wild Edric’s is a
great story and, both as legend and history, he’s alive and well in
Shropshire. After writing him into ‘Midnight Blue’, I attended a
history society meeting where local Stiperstones people claimed to have
heard him riding by, and one person even claimed direct descent. And
he’s alive and well in my life too. I've talked about him at a weekend I’m running on myths and legends and how to use
them in creative writing. I've even led a walk up to the Devil’s
Chair, where he and his knights are supposed to burst out of the ground.

It’s years now
since I wrote ‘Midnight Blue’, but Wild Edric has stayed with me ever
since. My books have included other characters I first came across in
Charlotte Burne. including the highwayman Humphrey Kynaston, and the
goddess of the River Severn, brought to life in ‘Sabrina Fludde’. But
nowhere have I found a sadder doom than Edric’s, lying beneath cold
rocks, unable to die - unable even to be at peace.

The romance of
Edric is Arthurian. He too is meant to sleep until his country is set
free. And the legend of Alderley, which Alan Garner drew on in his
book, ‘The Weirdstone of Brisingamen’, calls forth sleeping knights as
well. They’re a universal emblem – and yet they’re a personal emblem
too, especially if you’re a writer.

Every writer’s
like a sleeping knight beneath a hill, brought to life when he or she
has a story to tell, rising in the dark to gallop forth with a laugh, or
tears or a chill breeze to broadcast to the waiting world. When I’m
writing, I feel alive. When I’m not, I feel asleep. It’s as powerful as
that. Maybe the idea of writers as the white-knight guardians of a
watching world sounds a bit fanciful to you. But I’d say not. I’d say
what we do matters more than anyone could ever say, and that the idea of
an Edric who performs the role of guardian is only there because people
want it, just as they want writing, and stories and people like me.

So I can’t help
but identify with Wild Edric. He and I are two sides of the same coin.
He’s an age-old legend, trying to break free, and I’m a fresh-faced
pilgrim at the gate of Faerie, trying to get in.

PAULINE FISK'S first book, ‘Midnight Blue’ won
the Smarties Book Prize in 1990. It's the story of a girl called
Bonnie who has just found a home with her very young mother, in an inner
city block of flats. Just as it looks as if they can be happy together
and build their relationship, her controlling and malevolent
grandmother moves in: and Bonnie runs away, finding refuge in a mid-city
oasis, a walled garden where a mysterious man called Michael is
building a hot air balloon with the help of a strange shadowy boy.
Michael’s aim is to fly to the land beyond the sky:

Beyond
the sky. Not ‘in outer space’ or ‘in another galaxy’, but beyond the
sky… as though it were possible to peel away the edge of the blue and
pass straight through.

‘Sabrina Fludde’(2001), opens with a body floating down the
River Severn, the body of a lost, almost drowned girl whose memory is
lost too, who plucks the strange name Abren out
of the air for herself... In fact, the book is full of lost characters
with strange names. In the end, Abren has to
return to her own source (and that of the river) on the mountain
Plynlimon, where a cold and sinister family claim her as their own.
Alone and in terrible danger, she makes her escape down to the sea. And 'Mad Dog Moonlight' (2009) is another tale of a child seeking his true self and a place to belong. Pauline's latest book is 'Into the Trees', in which a boy comes to Belize looking for his father and falls in with a group of gap year volunteers. Living in the trees will change them all.

Pauline's books are beautifully written, interweaving
strands of the real world with airy fibres so fine, they are
barely even fantasy – more like mysticism, or elemental forces. She
writes about vast emotional themes of love, anger, insecurity, and the
need to belong to people and a place. They leave a lasting imprint on
the mind.

2 comments:

What a beautiful post, Pauline! I, too, am a devotee of Hans Andersen. The opening lines of the Little Mermaid are never far from me.Wild Edric, though - he's 'Wild' - he rides reguarly - he comes from underground... A folk memory of Woden? Though Edric's story has a fascination all of its own.

Followers

Note on copyright

As I'm about to welcome a number of guest writers to this blog, I thought a brief note about copyright would be in order. All posts and guest posts on this blog remain the copyright of whoever is the author. Obviously brief quotes are always fine, but if you would like to quote extensively from or reproduce any post in full, please seek permission from the author in the usual fashion. Many thanks for your co-operation.